Suburban poverty and the mission of the church

My church, The Well, recently held a week long missions trip to its own suburban neighborhood in order to open our eyes to the poor living “next door,” so to speak. The week was full of activities, including: working at a soup kitchen, caring for single mothers dealing with drugs at a halfway house, visiting the Russian immigrants at a nursing home, and helping the local Salvation Army stock their food pantry and catch up on yard work. We spent a great deal of time with children, many of whom were living in difficult situations of poverty and yet were filled with joy. We learned a lot about what the suburbs hide behind the veneer of shopping malls and carbon-copy home developments.

One of the most exciting events was a community forum that we held on Thursday, July 24, on suburban poverty. We invited five speakers from our area, including a local politician, a pastor, and a couple people involved with NGOs. The event was attended mostly by people outside of our church community. The dialogue was excellent, touching on important issues of government policy and the unique difficulties and complexities of suburban poverty.

Our church is following up on that insightful and humbling week with a seminar on “Missional in Suburbia” this Saturday, Aug. 9, with Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian. The seminar will take place from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm and costs $25. There is an open house meet-and-greet time on Friday evening. If you are in the area, I would recommend trying to attend this event.

The church is called to be with the poor, because that is where Jesus is. According to Matt. 25, Jesus says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Our calling as disciples of Jesus Christ demands that we follow him into solidarity with the poor, seeking liberation for them in correspondence with the way Jesus accomplished liberation for us all in his reconciling life, death, and resurrection. The mission of the church is constituted by its being sent by God to those who are hungry, thirsty, lonely, naked, sick, and imprisoned. We are commissioned by God to be with them as God came to be with us, to love them as God first loved us. Certainly, the efforts of our church and any church to embody the love of God in our local community are broken and incomplete, but they remain humble efforts at following Paul’s appeal “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1).

We do not worship first and then engage in the mission of the church to the poor and homeless. We worship precisely by engaging in mission. The being of the church is actualized in the act of mission. We are the church in that we are sent forth as God’s disciples, commissioned to love others in humble obedience to the command of Jesus Christ. Toward this end, we remember that “since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11-12).

The Spirit of the Lord: Update

It has been almost a full year since I wrote the last post in my series on “The Spirit of the Lord.” The time has come to bring this series to a close, though that may still take awhile. I have expanded the final sections somewhat, and I remain as prolix as ever. For those readers who are not familiar with this series, the entire series began as a response to a sermon about the meaning of Immanuel given on Christmas Eve of 2006. In this sermon, the pastor said that the peace which Christ brings is entirely an inner, spiritual peace which has no relation whatsoever with one’s physical existence and social relations with others. I was incensed, and I began writing that very evening. The series has now reached well over 30,000 words. While I began focusing on issues of christology, I have spent the most time on ecclesiology. My argument is that the gospel (what I call the euangelion of shalom) embraces the whole of creaturely existence, including the material, political, and economic dimensions of human society. The series is thus an effort at a missionally-shaped, christologically-grounded, and eschatologically-oriented ecclesiology.

Below is the outline of the series so far. Like most series on this blog, each successive post seems to get longer and more sophisticated than the last. The heart of the series is thus §10, and for those reading this series for the first time and looking for a way to catch up quickly, I recommend reading those posts.

The Spirit of the Lord God Is Upon Me:
Theological Reflections on Immanuel

§1. Introduction

§2. Sanitized Savior of Suburbia

§3. Deus Nobiscum

§4. Deus Pro Nobis

§4.1. Simul iustus et peccator

§4.2. Death of Death

§4.3. Yes and No

§4.4. Munus triplex

§4.5. God in the Abyss

§5. Euangelion of Shalom

§6. Israel’s Messiah

§7. The Mediation of Christ

§8. Missio Dei and Missio Communionis

§9. Corpus Christi

§10. The New Jerusalem

§10.1. Covenant

§10.2. Universality

§10.3. Political pacifism

§10.4. Logocentricism

§10.5. Forensicism

§10.6. Eschatology

§10.6.1. The Eschatological Being of the Ekklesia

§10.6.2. The Eschatological Basis of the Ekklesia

§10.6.3. The Eschatological Limit of the Ekklesia

§11. The Banquet of the New Jerusalem: Eucharistic Shalom

§11.1. The Eucharist and the Spirit

§11.2. The Eucharist and Mission

§11.3. The Eucharist and Peace

§11.4. The Eucharist and the Kingdom

§12. Anima Pacis: The Spirit of the New Jerusalem

§13. The Spirit of the Lord Is Upon Us

Augustine Blog Conference

Cynthia Nielsen of Per Caritatem is currently holding the first annual Augustine Blog Conference, entitled “Conversations with Augustine.” The conference seeks to bring Augustine’s thought “into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity.” Here is the current index of posts, which I will keep updated as the conference progresses:

“Conversations with Augustine”

1. Augustine and the Middle Ages

• Scott M. Williams, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus on Divine Memory: Pillagers of Augustine’s De Trinitate 15.4.25-26” (Response by Garrett Smith)
  
• Shane Wilkins, “Henry of Ghent and the Waning of the Divine Light” (Response by Jonathan McIntosh)

2. Augustine and the Reformation

• Dr. Phillip Cary, “Augustine and Luther” (Response by Dr. Joel Garver)
• Jason Ingalls, “Some Contemporary Reflections on Sin: Matt Jenson’s use of St. Augustine in The Gravity of Sin” (Response by Dave Belcher)

3. Augustine and Modernity

• Michael Jones, “On Restless Hearts: Augustine, Hegel, Ascent” (Response by Dr. Victor Salas)
• Mike Dagle, “Augustine and Plantinga: The Civitas Dei, the Civitas Mundi and the task of Ecclesial Philosophy” (Response by James Gibson)
• Mary C. Moorman, “Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation: St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology” (Response by Dan McClain)
• Bret Saunders, “Reading Augustine with Marion: A Postmodern Ressourcement” (Response by Dr. Joel B. Hunter)
  

Del Toro on demons

In anticipation of my upcoming AAR paper on Guillermo del Toro’s theopolitical imagination, here is a selection from a new USA Today article on del Toro’s understanding of demons and monsters:

"I'm interested in monsters because, much like archangels and angels, they represent a portion of the human soul," says the Mexican writer/director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which arrives Friday.

Del Toro has become a sought-after director for his distinctive creatures and otherworldly parables that use the realms of fantasy to explore fundamental human issues such as love, alienation, weakness and, of course, fear. . . .

"In adult movies, R-rated movies, monsters can signify many different things," says del Toro. "But in the (PG-13) Hellboy mythology, they symbolize our imperfections and how we can embrace them. If we were more eager and willing to accept otherness, things would be better between people." . . .

"I'm eager to explore themes that lend themselves easily to metaphor," he says. "The fantastic is the only tool we have nowadays to explain spirituality to a generation that refuses to believe in dogma or religion. Superhero movies create a kind of mythology. Creature movies, horror movies, create at least a belief in something beyond."

Multiculturalism and the problem of “authenticity”

“‘There is a certain way of being human that is my way’, wrote the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his much discussed essay on ‘The Politics of Recognition’. ‘I am called upon to live my life in this way… Being true to myself means being true to my own originality’. This sense of being ‘true to myself’ Taylor calls ‘the ideal of “authenticity”’. . . .

For the Enlightenment philosophes, equality required that the state should treat all citizens in the same fashion without regard to their race, religion or culture. This was at the heart of their arguments against the ancien regime and has been an important strand of liberal and radical thought ever since. For contemporary multiculturalists, on the other hand, people should be treated not equally despite their differences, but differently because of them. ‘Justice between groups’, as the political philosopher Will Kymlicka has put it, ‘requires that members of different groups are accorded different rights’. . . .

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. . . .

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved . . . is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality - how we ought to behave - derived from the facts of nature - how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that is defines ought. . . .

[T]here is something deeply inauthentic about the contemporary demand for authenticity.”

—Kenan Malik, “Identity Is That Which Is Given”

Brian Howell on church leadership, gender, and culture

People everywhere place a great deal of importance on these biological differences; however, the specific expression of that importance is driven not by biology; but by culture. . . . [R]eactions within the church to the roles of men and women in leadership must be understood as embedded in the cultural context in which they occur. The very notion of a “head pastor” is a culturally-specific—and even a theologically-specific—innovation related to the Protestant and American heritage of evangelicalism. In some denominations, the pastor has become a combination of CEO, president, and Chief Development Officer. Some are discomfited to think of a woman there, not because of any particular theological commitment, but because it just does not seem right. The pastor is a person who tells you what to do, the decider, the disciplinarian. It is no fluke that in the Western tradition we have called this person “father.” In images of the shepherd, we like to see a man carrying a sheep (preferably a big heavy one) back to the fold. Even as some come to be convinced by the theological and scriptural arguments in favor of egalitarianism, they may find themselves held back only by the cultural connotations of these images and ideas of the leader as “father.” . . .

The metaphor of the family is a powerful one in Scripture and in the church. Most families in the United States operate on a fairly distinct division of gendered labor. I admit that in my home, I do the taxes, load the car, clean the gutters, and mow the lawn—or I did until our daughter turned eleven and involuntarily took that over. My wife does more laundry than I do, makes Halloween costumes for the kids, and arranges their dentist appointments. It is no surprise that in the church, women often get the job of organizing the nursery while men manage the finances; our families often run very similarly.

Other families, however, have other cultural traditions. Indonesian families do not trust men with money. Men are too easily swayed by their emotions, they say. Men are full of passion and behave erratically. Women are more stable, better able to think rationally and handle money or business transactions. In this case, it would be the women of the church who are more likely to sit on the finance committee. Perhaps men would be selected for arranging the entertainment at the church’s anniversary celebration.

I do not say all this to argue that some cultures are better than others. What an understanding of culture’s influence should do is put gross generalizations about the nature of men and women out of reach. Moreover, it challenges us to think about how and why we value particular attributes connected to these gender stereotypes. So often we believe that we are reacting to Scripture or that the powerful feelings we have about particular gender activities are our created nature. Rather, we need to realize that we are exhibiting the cultural context in which we live.

—Brian Howell, in E-Quality

Water and alcohol: kenosis and plerosis

In “A History of Hooch,” Sam Anderson reviews Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately. He writes the following:

“Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution. . . .

One of Drink’s most fascinating subplots, as it turns out, is humanity’s apparently universal contempt for water. In ancient Greece, water drinkers ‘were believed not only to lack passion but also to exude a noxious odor’; in post-WWI France, they were thought to be fat, weak, and pimply—hurtful prejudices that I, having once been publicly berated by an Irishwoman for ordering a pint of water at a pub, can confirm still exist today. In fact, such enduring hydrophobia might make for a good popular history of its own, if only we could get someone to write it.”

In short, alcohol is the drink of glory and fullness, while water is the drink of humiliation and emptiness. In theological terms, alcohol represents plerosis, while water represents kenosis. To be a water drinker is to identify with Christ in his self-humiliation and death, while to be a beer and booze drinker is to identify with Christ in his resurrection and glorification. But in the same way that the Crucified One is also the Resurrected One, so too our lives cannot be dominated by one drink over the other; rather, we must live in the dialectical tension of both water and wine. Or, even more radically, we must realize that to take up our crosses is to live in the power of the resurrection, and similarly, to enjoy the riches of Christ’s resurrection is to be the servant of all. And so we must drink water in the way we drink single-malt scotch, and we must drink single-malt scotch in the way we drink water.

We must realize that taking up our crosses in the drinking of water is to live in resurrection glory, if only by way of remembrance and anticipation: we remember the way Christ turned water into wine and we look ahead to the eschatological feast of the lamb, at which we will drink freely—always satisfied, but never glutted. The miracle at Cana itself was a proleptic realization of God’s consummation of creation, in which creaturely reality will be glorified in correspondence to the resurrection glory of Easter. Similarly, the wedding feast is the manifestation and remembrance of Christ’s blessing of wine at the Last Supper, in which the fullness of alcoholic glory took on the emptiness of aquatic humility. In the same way that the Son of God took on “the likeness of sinful flesh,” so too the liquid ambrosia took on the likeness of humble hydration.

For now, we live between cross and resurrection, between Cana and New Jerusalem. We walk in the way of water, but in the enrapturing power of hooch. We must identify ourselves with those who are unable to drink from the vine and are confined to the tap. We must live in solidarity with the many who will never enjoy the alcoholic parables of the kingdom. Those who have “tasted and seen that the Lord is good” are sent as ambassadors of Christ, as witnesses to the glory of beer and wine. We are ministers of holy inebriation. As we drink from the cup of the new covenant, we go forward as bibulous missionaries, stumbling forward in pentecostal intoxication, following Christ’s command to give drink to those who are thirsty.

Jesus said, “I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” In the meantime, we pray, “thy kingdom come.” Come, Lord Jesus.